Gary Puckett entered an In-N-Out Burger recently and unexpectedly found himself in a dialogue with his twentysomething self.

At the burger joint somewhere on the road back from San Diego, the onetime lead singer of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap stopped in for a bite and encountered a room where he suspected he was the only person over college age. There were 50 or more customers, he estimates, packing the tables and booths -- and one thing about them jumped out at Puckett instantly.

"Many, many, many of those people were staring at their phones," the 73-year-old recalled. "In the '60s, we had no idea of that kind of thing."

Rita Moreno has an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony and a Grammy to her name, which might lead one to believe that another trophy might feel like old news to the "West Side Story" actress.

Well, guess again.

Moreno, who stars in the new road-trip comedy "Remember Me," felt thrilled when she heard that the Newport Beach Film Festival had chosen her as one of two recipients of its Legends Award. This month, the 84-year-old will join songwriter Burt Bacharach in accepting the awards at the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach.

When Gordon Waller, half of the 1960s folk-rock duo Peter & Gordon, died in 2009, his former partner issued a modest statement to the press: "I am just a harmony guy, and Gordon was the heart and soul of our duo."

This weekend, Peter Asher will bring his British Invasion tribute show to Laguna Beach. And he's more than happy to be the harmony guy again, at least for a number or two. Waller, whose vocals with Asher pushed "A World Without Love" and other hits up the chart half a century ago, will duet with his old partner through video segments. According to Asher, that decision wasn't just motivated by nostalgia — it also stemmed from knowing that, in some cases, there was no substitute for his boyhood friend.

Like many events of its kind, the Silent River Film Festival will offer a climactic night in which speakers take the stage and wax poetic about the movies the audience has witnessed over the past few days.

In this case, though, the speakers will not be award recipients. They'll be actual poets.

The Irvine-based festival, entering its fourth year, plans to add a literary component to its program when the screenings begin Oct. 17. Director Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is a published poet and founder of an online literary magazine, and she's seeking kindred spirits to attend any number of the festival's 50 films — and then write poems about them, with a reading scheduled during the event's second-to-last evening.

SAN DIEGO — At the end of a rehearsal last month in a room near the Old Globe, actor Brandon Gill as Benvolio presided over the death of Romeo and Juliet and sang in a keening wail, "It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah."

Those words, part of a Leonard Cohen ballad that Jeff Buckley helped make famous, might have applied to the play's circumstances as well. "The Last Goodbye" is a musical combining Shakespeare with the songs of Buckley, an artist who grew up in the Southland and went on to amass a worldwide following before he died at age 30 in a 1997 swimming accident.

As such, it offers a bittersweet pairing of two artists: one whose canon ranks among Western civilization's deepest, and another who had barely begun assembling his.

Iam not a writer of prose. This is not an article, an anecdote or short story. It is simply the imperfect account of an evening from several points of view.

So begins the document that Lee Mallory has set in front of me at a cramped wooden table in the corner of Alta Coffee in Newport Beach.

By now, I've grown so accustomed to word processors and social media that the text — written on an old manual typewriter and photocopied for my use — looks like a carefully guarded antique. Which, in a way, it is.